I heard a YouTuber say today, "We are now available wherever you get your podcast; that means that an audio format of the show is now available on both Spotify and on Apple Music/Podcasts,“ and, like…isn’t the contradiction of the first half against merely 2 (technically 3) locations not glaringly obvious?
Like, I get that most people don’t conceive of things on their computers, anymore, in terms of files and there’s a convenience to going to a centralized service to browse for a particular thing (podcasts, in this case) but…it’s still annoying that we’re shoving things which still, currently, – with relative frequency – can be accessed not behind proprietary, paywalled locations into these locations that’re beyond collective control.
It’s at least pretty cool that the statement is true enough most of the time to be in wide use. The walled gardens continue to expand, and the situation will get worse. But by and large podcasts are pretty open and accessible in a decentralized way.
I know Spotify is grossly proprietary, but is Apple’s new service too? For a long time it seems like being on iTunes or whatever meant they also had an open RSS feed for podcasts clients?
I couldn’t quite say but finding the RSS feed has always been a massive pain for me, whenever the only source someone gives is Apple Podcasts. That said, maybe it’s my fault and I’m just not looking carefully enough; always possible.
Many free open podcast apps and webpages aggregate and index RSS feeds. Where you can simply search the podcast name and they will find the correct feed for you. Never had an issue.
I’m aware of fyyd and podcast index, since they are both supported by Antennapod.
I think you’re reading this as me having trouble finding podcasts; I find it mildly infuriating that Spotify and Apple are becoming the face of finding podcasts in a way that obfuscates how things actually work. I don’t like that these two entities become the only listed means to find a podcast when others exist and will cause lay people to associate podcasts with just them, if that makes more sense.
What do you use for podcasts? The software should be handling it so you don’t have to think about it much.
I’m on AntennaPod (FOSS podcast client), and looking at the Add Podcast screen, I see it does include Apple Podcasts. You can add RSS feeds for other sources, but mostly I search the name of whatever podcast I want and it finds it.
There are podcast aggregators out there that aren’t just Apple-ify, although now that I’m doing a cursory search, maybe a use for Google’s silly search engine to waste Google’s servers for good.
Search:
"podcast name" filetype:rss"podcast name" filetype:xml